


The Werewolf

by chantefable



Series: Fury and Perseverance [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Disability, Family, Friendship, Gen, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, Magic, Ministry of Magic, Politics, Social Issues, Werewolf Culture, Werewolf Politics, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-15
Updated: 2015-07-15
Packaged: 2018-04-09 12:58:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4349693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chantefable/pseuds/chantefable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Draco Malfoy leads an utterly mundane existence of a working-class werewolf. He experiences the changes in the world around him, in his relationships and what matters to him most, and in his very self. He also has to deal with the presence of Remus Lupin in his life, in various senses.</p><p>(In which Draco thinks about his mistakes, injustice, and being a werewolf. He also has to handle a family haunting situation.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Werewolf

_It is unnatural to cling to a departing soul in such a way,_ thought Draco on many occasions. 

And yet Remus Lupin, werewolf, teacher, father and husband, master of the Dark Arts and of the defence against them, was frequently on his mind, a steadfastly haunting presence that failed to be alarming and uncomfortable.

Of course, each person is entitled to their own fancies and fugues, and if Draco wished to dwell on Lupin’s accomplishments and capacity for attachment, on the brighter moments of Lupin’s own life even as Draco looked at himself in the mirror, pale and gaunt, with misshapen raised scars where Fenrir Greyback’s long claws had lacerated his flesh, then it was all too understandable. What other balm could Draco apply to his lacerated mind? This was his life after months in Azkaban, after his parents’ prompt and voluntary exile to Montenegro: his days were bleak and bland, and his cursed nights were infused with Wolfsbane to keep morose roaming at bay. He worked in a tiny apothecary in a dim and deserted stretch of Diagon Alley, the long hours of chopping weeds and slicing petals blurring together: an utterly mundane existence of a working-class werewolf. 

And if Draco often thought of Lupin’s life and choices, the kind of fate that could have befallen the man and the kind that actually had, then surely this obsessive contemplation was less harmful than seething resentment and blind anger. In truth, these idle fantasies were doubtless more beneficial to Draco, and by extension to anyone who was in contact with him, than ruthless self-flagellation. He had accepted the stinging burn of shame, but wallowing in self-hate would have been as luxuriously unacceptable as wallowing in self-pity: Draco had the duty to find a way to truly live with his past. And his present.

Therefore, Draco thought about Lupin often: when he mended his cloak and his well-worn trousers; when he toyed with the pitiful stack of Sickles on the nightstand, one that thankfully grew just tall enough every month to cover the rent; when all of his attention – eyes and ears and even sense of smell – became attuned to whomever had wandered into the ramshackle apothecary, and the zeal to ease a person’s woes suffused his entire being. 

He thought about Lupin when his raging hunger woke him up from dreams of choice, juicy morsels and crunching bones. He thought about Lupin when he craved fresh, fragrant meat so much that he was dizzy and nauseous, and when he longed for warm, viscous liquid to quench his thirst.

In those moments, when every fibre of his being seemed alight while the rest of the world felt cold and distant, shrouded in smoke, Draco wondered how Lupin had made it, day after day, projecting a semblance of luminous serenity. In truth, Draco knew that Lupin had been just like any other werewolf on the inside: an intelligent, ferocious animal. Resilient, bold, and continuously starving.

Draco did not have to imagine what it had been _like_ for Lupin to repress his need day after day. But he wondered _how_ Lupin had done it, from one day to the next, how he had made his humble and placid façade appear so effortless as he had slurped his oatmeal porridge at Hogwarts professors’ table on school-day mornings, ambled about the grounds at a moderate, human pace, and handed out patient corrections to the drivel that students routinely attempted to pass for homework when all the while, he had been able to rip out throats and mutilate bodies. 

(Draco’s memory was not so befogged that he could not recall the knowledgeable glint in Lupin’s eyes, his stance and his gait. Lupin had been an experienced werewolf. A natural beast.)

And what of Lupin’s days among the vagrant werewolves, back when the quiet terror had been creeping up, with people anticipating Voldemort’s return and their conscience swinging about like a pendulum? Dumbledore hadn’t sent him away from Hogwarts to be a vegetarian. Lupin had spied among those who prowl on the outskirts of towns and on the edges of human vision, for people are eager to overlook the ugly and the horrid. As if their ignorance will make those things disappear. At the same time, Snape had spied among those who prowl in the open, their high station and veneer of respectability making them appear safe and unassuming – like plain scarred human flesh stretched tight over a werewolf’s wretched flesh and bones. And it was hard to tell which one of them, Lupin or Snape, had seen more vile things.

Either way, Draco, who had shed his boyhood narrow-mindedness like a snake sheds its skin, knew that Lupin’s conscience was bespattered with blood. The knowledge sat uneasily in his gut, sometimes burning his eyelids on sleepless nights, sometimes prickling his fingers as they reached for a bottle of Firewhisky. 

It was hurtful to lack someone to idolise; Draco, who had grown up in the comfort of undiluted adoration for his father, found disillusionment to be the keenest kind of agony. Even worse, the disenchantment with Lucius Malfoy, with his views and his faction had been so great that it had left Draco’s mind a charred and barren land where no seed of gullibility seemed to grow. It would have been easier to live a fool with a new unquestionable ideal – some hero of the new age, a voice of the new Ministry for Magic, perhaps Harry Potter himself. But Draco had no more trust left to give – like a cruelly ravished virgin, he was bitterly suspicious about sweet promises, and the figures raised to prominence these days were singing far too sweet. To Draco’s mind, they were nothing but a flock of Fwoopers monopolising the wireless and the _Daily Prophet_ , their song driving to distraction.

Still, there was a core of worthiness about Lupin, something about his dedication and tenacity, his fierce appetite for survival – hadn’t he lived through bitter years when all his friends had been dead, or as good as? – that made Draco wish to be able to appreciate him whole-heartedly and unconditionally. Lupin could have been a good idol, an easy man to love – and for little Teddy’s sake, Draco wished to be able to cherish his memory with no reservations.

But apparently, Draco was too much of a battered grown-up himself for that, drowning in ambiguity and nightmares about having been accessory to murder. However, by virtue of these very experiences, he had genuine respect and admiration for the man Remus Lupin had been, walking the edge of hunger and delusion in the shade.

As for the man Remus Lupin had become, that was an entirely different story.

He met with Lupin every time he came to his Aunt’s house, which was once a week or more. It took almost two full years for Draco to stop searching Andromeda’s face for the familiar features of his mother, and almost just as long for Andromeda to truly see him as his own person instead of some odd two-faced Janus amalgamation of Narcissa Black and Lucius Malfoy. But now, there were no suppressed startles when Draco answered some question with words that would never have tumbled past his mother’s nor his father’s lips. Now, Draco had made two new connections: an Aunt with whom he hadn’t been acquainted and a nephew whose very conception and birth had only occurred because so many things had been a twisted tangle of misfortunes – but who was so precious and loveable: a new human being, a person utterly independent of the gruesome wartime. 

Aunt Andromeda was Draco’s anchor, unexpectedly affectionate and a stern but welcome guide when Draco had none, left to fend off for himself with no support from smothering Ministry employees, parole officers, and supervising Healers. Teddy was the centre of his world, a beautiful, inquisitive child, perfect from the tip of his snotty meta-morphing nose to his tiny toes. Him, Draco loved unconditionally, and it was a potent, robust kind of love that generously granted Draco moments of feeling happy, and needed, and carefree.

But of course, there was also Lupin, who complicated things. 

Lupin was haunting Aunt Andromeda’s house. She was unaware of it, and little Teddy, likewise. Lupin’s ghost apparently knew that, and so had felt no compulsion to hide from Draco the very first time he had come for a visit – straight from his shift at the apothecary, the slightly stale smell of Gurdyroots still lingering about his clothes. Draco’s poker-face, perfected through hours of the most atrocious of Voldemort’s dinners, was flawless enough to fool even someone who was supposed to have otherworldly insight. On the inside, however, Draco felt even more awkward and confused than he had been prepared to be during his first visit to Andromeda’s home; and the arduous process of figuring out what in Merlin’s name was going on and whether it was prudent to say anything had been excruciating in the extreme.

Afterlife was not agreeing with Lupin. He looked younger than in life, but somehow smudged and straining – a blurry, shuddering form striving to thread itself back into the fabric of life. This Lupin was more ghost than werewolf – indeed, over the years Draco had come to think that Lupin was a ghost entirely, a gloomy loiterer akin to the most miserable soul imprints floating about in the corridors of Hogwarts. 

Ghost Lupin was sad. Ghost Lupin was lonely. Ghost Lupin was useless. 

Ghost Lupin was, as Draco had found out in the course of one particularly queer, agonising conversation, inarticulate, hesitant, and fearful, and watched the lives of Andromeda and Teddy with little recognition and much befuddlement.

Ghost Lupin was pathetic, and would not move on.

Well, in this, at least, he displayed some obstinacy that would befit a rabid dog, and so Draco felt a slight sliver of kinship with him, even in ghost form. But still, Ghost Lupin was absolutely useless to his aunt and nephew. Ghost Lupin’s protracted existence was a self-inflicted act of cruelty. Ghost Lupin’s presence, if discovered, had the potential of being upsetting or even harmful to Aunt Andromeda and little Teddy.

In short, Ghost Lupin was one more problem in Draco’s life. 

Doubtless, he did not rank as high as going to sleep on an empty stomach a couple nights a week, or as the damp chill that lurked in every corner of Draco’s cramped flat. Or as high as the continuous passage of new laws – on employment, on accommodation, on healthcare for creatures and beings with magical disabilities – each one making the atmosphere a little more stifling; each one inching incrementally closer to the tipping point when the world would be transformed into an abyss of despair for those like Draco; each one driving home the point that his kind of people were alien, worthless, and unwelcome. 

But Ghost Lupin was still enough of a tacit nuisance to add to Draco’s burden of worry, somewhere along the lines of general frustration with the monstrous greed and neglect of the combined forces of the Ministry for Magic, of Gringotts Bank, and of the crème de la crème of wizarding Britain as currently represented by the Greengrass clan. Just enough of a nuisance to keep most of Draco’s attention on his immediate circle of himself, Aunt Andromeda, Teddy, and the very few people whom he called his friends these days (like Lavender Brown, as mauled and as stubborn as Draco himself, walking around with invisible wounds and a hint of violent lust on her sour breath). 

And so Draco did just that, instead of allowing himself the time and space to ponder the full extent of the homicidal insanity and depraved appetite of those who were the driving force behind the decision-making process and of those who, armed with ignorance and detachment, laboriously bled ink onto snow-white sheets of parchment and carried out unchallenged orders.

Which was why Draco devoted great effort to the matter of figuring out how to help Ghost Lupin to move forward. Onwards. Beyond. This was important; this concerned his closest and dearest, and was therefore vital. Methodically, he searched for a possible option: a task made much more challenging by the numerous established means of magical gatekeeping that were incredibly efficient in limiting access to knowledge and even the most mundane Charms, let alone such potentially transgressive Spells as facilitation of the passage to the afterlife. It was vexing.

Ghost Lupin himself was useless in this just like in everything else. Privately, Draco was not much surprised that it was him who happened to be caught in the web between the worlds, and not Nymphadora Tonks. Nymphadora must have been more quick-witted and courageous out of the two of them. Had those been his parents, Draco was convinced that it would have been similar. (Narcissa was capable of daring, bravery, judgement, while Lucius was… cowardly. Disappointing. Still, Draco missed them both, his love for them a constant sore ache, like a badly healed fracture.)

While struggling to solve the riddle of Ghost Lupin, Draco frequently thought of werewolf Lupin, so in control of his animalistic impulses, wearing his brute strength in such an unassuming, casual way that at a passing glance he appeared as non-threatening and ordinary as a Pygmy Puff. It was not a skill that Draco had mastered yet. But something about that memory kept scratching at the surface of his thoughts. Draco kept coming back to it, mulling it over as he sliced, diced, and stirred, as he spent his days in the dusty labyrinth of cauldrons, beakers, and bowls. Remus Lupin had possessed some unalienable attribute, even back when he had had no money, no job, no shelter, and no vocation: acceptance. 

Acceptance had been a crucial part of Remus Lupin. It had been so enmeshed in Lupin’s being that Draco had simply failed to dwell on it at first, failed to recognise it. It was an attribute of a double-edged sword kind: an acceptance of his lot, no matter how loathsome and pitiful, and self-acceptance (no matter how loathsome and pitiful the self; no matter how heinous and derisible Lupin might have considered his own person).

Acceptance was what was woefully missing from Ghost Lupin, like a lost piece of the puzzle. And so the next time Draco came to Andromeda’s, he spoke to Ghost Lupin (while washing the dishes, seemingly alone). And the next time, Draco spoke to him again (in the garden), and then again (in the corridor, having put little Teddy to bed). It was strange, telling Ghost Lupin things that Draco imagined Lupin himself telling someone else in this situation. And even as he voiced them, Draco thought that perhaps it was not only Ghost Lupin who needed to hear some kindness, but Draco himself. Most certainly, delivering a kindness and a promise had felt exquisite and delicious: a primal, savage grace that Draco had not known before.

Self-acceptance turned out to be better than magic. Or maybe it _was_ magic, documented in books he wasn’t entitled to read, or in books that were too dangerous to be written.

One day, Draco came and, while they were playing with a little broom bought out of Draco’s meagre wages, Ghost Lupin looked at him and Teddy and softly melted away, smiling.

Teddy had been a delight that day, in a particularly good mood.

There was definitely something magical about it, something true.

As for himself, Draco thought that Remus Lupin’s kind of acceptance was not one that would grant him peace, or a will to live (something that Draco, unlike Ghost Lupin, was still very much in need of.) He acknowledged his pressing need for self-acceptance, something that was still crumbling and incomplete, something he was still struggling to stitch together out of sleepless starry nights and Teddy’s clumsy crayon drawings, out of staring at the eerily changed line of his own jaw in the mirror and out of rubbing salve in Lavender’s sore, cracking joints on particularly bad days. 

But what Draco knew as viscerally as he knew the smell of the woods and the sound of fire was that he could not, like Lupin, accept _his lot_ as a werewolf: he would live with his condition like he lived with the consequences of his actions in the war, with his responsibility and the odious tattoo on his forearm, but he could not accept the constantly shrinking slot allocated to him in this life, the duplicity and the spiteful malice that came with averted eyes and denied breadcrumbs. To accept that would be to actively invoke injustice, not only onto himself but onto others.

Draco had been a traitor once. He knew how it felt, and it was unconscionable to repeat the same fatal error: to betray life through the silent endorsement of grievances. 

And so Draco kept coming to Aunt Andromeda’s house, once a week or more. Kept going to work every day, effortlessly ignored by the madding crowd. Kept missing his parents, and combing thistles out of Lavender’s frizzy hair after a wild dash through the forest, and kept staring at the lacerations marring his side in the murky depths of the mirror. Kept growing strong, like a flame too stubborn to be extinguished, and persistently searched for a similar, familiar spark in the eyes of others roaming the streets.

They were looking back, and Draco’s blood ran hotter, hopeful, unrestrained. A generous impulse of self-acceptance and trust.

**Author's Note:**

> This story was written for a prompt by aigooism, who'd made a donation to contribute to the effort of helping Haiti. The progress following the Haiti earthquake [ was slow and only partially efficient](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/11/haiti-earthquake-recovery_n_1197730.html), with [the American Red Cross failing to explain how exactly they'd spent almost half a billion dollars](http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/06/12/413791387/american-red-cross-press-conference-in-haiti-gets-heated). The [European Commission alone contributed about €248 million in humanitarian aid to Haiti since the 2010 earthquake](http://ec.europa.eu/echo/where/latin-america-carribean/haiti_en), but Haiti is still much in need of support to rebuild its infrastructure and address pressing needs of the population – [with cholera becoming a major crisis](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ted-oswald/un-cholera-plan-in-haiti-_b_6726898.html). Many humanitarian organisations are still actively working in the region, including the healthcare-oriented [Doctors Without Borders](http://www.msf.org/haiti) ([donate](http://www.msf.org/donate)), [Partners In Health](http://www.pih.org/blog/haiti-continues-to-battle-cholera-outbreaks) ([donate](https://donate.pih.org/give-today/2)), and [World Health Organization](http://www.paho.org/hai/) ([donate](https://secure.globalproblems-globalsolutions.org/site/Donation2?df_id=7342&7342.donation=form1)).


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